The "pad"

There is a nifty new device out there on the market that will charge your cell phone or other electronic device just by placing it on a pad (no plugs required.) That's pretty cool. It uses an ambient electrical field to charge them. The thing is that the type of field it uses exists all around us all the time. It's nowhere close to as powerful as this pad is but it's there. In fact, whilst this pad may be able to charge your battery in a few hours (I haven't checked the specs on it) there was talk over a year ago about a technology that could do the same thing with your cell phone or other gadget while it rested in your pocket. This technology would take a little longer to charge but it worked all the time so it didn't have to do the job in 3 hours. It did the job constantly.

Herein lies the reason that we will probably never see the earlier technology and will be stuck with the pad (which still tethers you to a wall socket even if it works in a really cool way and you don't have to mess with multiple plugs)

In 2007 a study showed that there were about 203 million cell phones in use in the United States alone (2 billion world wide.)

My home has three phones in use. One by me (I talk very little), one by my wife (who talks a bit more) and one by our teenager (who texts a LOT). I figure we're a fairly rounded and average dynamic of users. My wife has to charge her phone daily, my son every day and a half or so and I charge every few days. Charging takes about 3 hours for each of our phones.

My chargers are all very close in their energy consumption. One uses 22 watts and two of them use 33 watts each.

So here comes the math (this happens a lot with me)
I charge every 3 days
kid charges every 1.5 days
wife charges every 1 day

Average 1.8 days between charging (I'll go low ball here and call it once every 2 days)
Average power consumption = (33+33+22)/3 = 29.3 watts (I'll round up to 30 and make up for that low ball)
Charging time for each phone = 3 hours
3 hours @ 30 watts = 90 watt hours (every 2 days) = 45 watt hours per day

Any of you who pay the electric bill know that you are charged by the kilowatt hour and not the watt hour. So here is where our number gets small because we divide it by 1000.

My household uses .045 kilowatt hours per day to charge our phones.
We pay 13 cents per kilowatt hour for our energy (SCE {Southern California Edison} are highway robbers) so we pay .00585 dollars per day to charge our three phones (about half a cent for those paying attention.)

That isn't much at all even less when you divide it by 3 (to get the amount each phone costs). Even at 365 days a year that's only 71 cents a year we spend charging one phone. But remember that first little statistic? There were, in 2007, 203 million cell phones in use in the United States. So let's multiply that 17 cents by 203 million so we end up with $144,485,250

So in 2007 the U.S. power suppliers were making just over 144 million dollars a year just by consumers charging their phones. How much of that money do you think they had to throw at the team who was developing a way to charge cell phones for FREE before they handed over the rights to their research? I would probably give up on John Q. Public for a measly 100 million or so myself.

So we are left with just a taste of what that technology could have meant for us. We have the pad and will soon have household surfaces (couch arms, coffee tables, computer desks, etc.) that will charge our phone just by laying it on top of them just as long as they stay plugged in so good ol' Uncle Power-Company gets 144 million a year (and that's just for the cell phones. Don't forget about the media players, PDA's, GPS units, etc.)